


The Lonely Night Through

by Barkour



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 10:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6113989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chat Noir accidentally plants a hand in Ladybug's bosom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lonely Night Through

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the song "Guilty" (music by Richard A. Whiting and Harry Akst, with lyrics by Gus Kahn). [I like Billie Holiday's cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg56e725LLk).

A night's patrol culminated in the two of them sharing a rooftop and a marvelous view of the city spread out before them like a map of stars. They'd finished their gyros, and as Chat Noir pocketed the trash the wind buffeted him. Perhaps he simply leaned too far. He put his hand out.

Ladybug yelled. He startled, falling back on his butt on the flat roof. 

"My lady?"

His heart did leap. His lady, to shout so in his ear! An akuma, or a cat burglar, putting Chat Noir to shame; but Ladybug did not tremble at such sights. A cascade of horrors chilled his flesh as he turned to her. Chat Noir could not bear to live another day without the crinkling of her eyes, the wiggle of her nose, the heat of her touch--

Ladybug slapped him full across the face.

He recoiled. His head struck a pipe with musical precision. The note hummed a long chord in his head. Chat Noir stared at the city lights. These were stars, he realized.

"Me-Ow," said Chat Noir.

"Keep your paws to yourself!" snarled Ladybug. Her cheeks were nearly red as her mask. Twas fury lit the beauty. "I know you're a tomcat but-- But!" Her chest heaved beneath her crossed arms. Anger took her words.

Chat Noir felt wonderingly at his jaw. With a claw at the corner, a claw light at the corner, he pushed his jaw to its proper position. The joint popped. A back tooth began to ache.

"My lady," he said, very polite in word and manner, "have I offended you? Is my natural musk overwhelming?" Adrien wondered if he'd remembered to put on deodorant. Plagg's cheese fetish surely did not help.

She glared darkly at him, but Ladybug was kind, and already her scowl began to fade to mere suspicion.

"You know what you did."

"I am pawsitive I do not!"

At last subsided the heat suffusing her sweet, lovely cheeks, so warm a gold. Ladybug gave him a look. It was an unimpressed look. She only ever bestowed it on Chat Noir. He preened.

"I'll slap you again," said Ladybug.

"Please," said Chat Noir, already pleased, "I can take no more punishment!"

Ladybug kicked him. He evaded the pipe. A cat landed on a cat's feet. Huffing, she looked away.

He considered her profile. She had a darling nose. A wrinkle marred it, an unhappy wrinkle. She glanced at him sidelong. Her eye narrowed. He wanted to smooth the line from her nose with his thumb.

Instead he drew his legs up and resettled into a careful crouch beside her. His shoulders hunched. He tipped his head, right cheek turned to the ground, to look at her. Ladybug eyed him. He did his best to look thoughtful. Adrien had a great deal of practice at that. It was almost all he did at Father's events.

"Of course," murmured Chat Noir, "a slap is not unlike a kiss."

Ladybug groaned and leaned away from him. "Stop your yowling, Chat."

"An act of passion."

"Is that why you grabbed my breast?" asked Ladybug with her usual frankness.

"Passion," he said, with much of it to show, "that leads a man to excuse me?"

Ladybug, expression flat, looked at him.

"Pardon, my love?" He dug a little claw into his cat's ear. "I must have misheard you."

Ladybug's brow arched even as her lids dropped. She inched nearer to him on her toes, but a single small movement. Chat Noir took two long crab steps further in the same direction. The pipe leered.

"You touched," she said, demonstrating, "my breast." Her teeth flashed upon her lip. She enunciated each word beautifully.

"I did not!" Chat Noir squeaked. His voice cracked twice. "I would never-- You accuse me of-- Not that I would call you a liar-- The act of a, a scoundrel--" 

What new registers he found.

She squinted at him a moment longer. And like that, Ladybug laughed. Her lips trembled first, then she threw her head back and snorted. He stared at her with his hands drawn up like paws before his chest.

"I'll, I'll slap myself," he said feebly. "Here, you can start!"

He made to grab her hand, noted her wrist's closeness to her chest, and promptly snatched both his hands up and back over his shoulders. The pipe sang its triumph. Chat Noir buckled.

Ladybug's laughter doubled. "It's all right, it's all right!" Nothing of elegance named itself in her laughing. 

She took his wrists, one in each hand. His fingers were limp against her arms. He didn't dare cradle her wrists. His wrists hurt too badly, and he didn't dare. A sickly knot weighted his belly.

"I," he said, "I am--so sorry, Ladybug," and Ladybug turned her face a quarter from him, to tease at him through her lashes. The knot doubled in mass. "I don't deserve forgiveness--"

She stroked his wrists with her fingertips. The corner of her smile turned secret and wry.

"You're forgiven," said Ladybug. She pinched the knob of his left wrist between finger and thumb, and Chat Noir gasped. "This time. You couldn't fake that embarrassment. I know you too well."

"You don't know me at all," he said. 

He did not say it with heat, or passion, or invitation. It seemed to him then that the city's lights were only lights. His suit was not magic but leather that stuck to his skin. Ladybug was not a goddess, and he was only a boy.

Ladybug lifted his hands. His fingers curled. He flinched. She laid the heels of his hands against her cheeks and Ladybug smiled at him again. Her lashes arched. 

"Yes, I do," she said. "You're my friend, Chat Noir. And my partner. I trust you."

He licked at his lips. His fingers eased across her cheeks. 

"How do you know you can trust me," he asked her, "when you don't know my name?"

Ladybug's gaze unfocused. Her smile lopsided.

"I know a girl," she told him, "who stammers like you do when she's around the boy she, she--likes."

Loves, thought Chat Noir. She was only a girl. The wind ran thin fingers through her hair. Long, black strands moved across her face. She wrinkled her lips at them; her eyes crossed; she frowned.

Chat Noir moved his hand. Mindful of her lips he caught the hairs on a claw and guided them from her mouth.

Ladybug's nose wiggled. Her eyes crinkled. "Just watch your hands," she said. "Remember, I'm a lady. And I can still beat you." She let go of his wrists to sock his shoulders, a light one-two that rocked him on his heels.

"You are always a lady to me," said Chat Noir, and he drew his hands from her face, her warm face, her girlish face.

"And I can beat you."

"But you're merciful, too," he said, "and show amnesty to those who are truly repentant."

"And are you?"

"Yes," said Chat Noir. He smiled. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes," said Ladybug. 

"Tell me your name."

"Would you tell me yours?"

"If you asked," he said. 

Ladybug reached to him. She pressed three fingers to his mouth.

"No," she said.

He did not kiss her fingers. He let her touch slip from him. Chat Noir took a breath and nodded.

"Then when you're ready," he said.

"I might never be ready to tell you," she warned him.

"Then I'll wait," said Chat Noir.

"Silly chaton," she said, but she brushed his cheek with the back of her hand and he knew that he was forgiven though he did not deserve it. 

For later, as Adrien lay in bed and Plagg, his teasing ended, snored on the satin cushion, Adrien looked at his hand and he wondered. 

Had he done it? He was afraid that he had. He'd no memory of doing it, no lingering sensation in his palm of the shape of her. He would not have done it; he would not have meant to do it. He made a fist of his hand and held it to his breast with the other hand. Shadows moved soft across his ceiling. 

Think of the line, he thought, and walk it. He imagined it a beam or a wire stretched between two tall buildings, like the walkers Mother had watched with him. Here is the hero, and here is the fool. Did Ladybug walk it as he did? He hadn't thought it before.

His heart beat in his chest. Adrien swallowed. I would cut off my hand before I touched my lady like that, he thought; but he thought too of Ladybug's laugh and her fingers on his cheek.

"I trust you," she'd said. 

Surely if Ladybug trusted him, then he might trust Chat Noir too. Adrien was smiling at the ceiling. His wrist ached where she'd pinched it. He laughed, and Plagg stirred, grumbling. 

"What are you doing now?" Plagg complained. 

"Dreaming," said Adrien. "Go back to sleep, Plagg."

"If you'd stop mooning," said Plagg.

"How," said Adrien to the ceiling, "when the moon is so beautiful?"

"Yeuch," Plagg said. "I hope you like hairballs in your shoes."

"When my lady smiles at me," Adrien told the night, "I love everything."

Plagg made retching noises. Adrien turned the cushion over on top of him.

**Author's Note:**

> Working title on my phone: "chat touches the diddy"


End file.
